The exemplary embodiment relates to idea generation and finds particular application in connection with a system and method for classification of reviewer comments on ideas.
Idea-generating social media platforms include Idea Management Systems (IMS's), such as employee and customer suggestion systems, Q&A sites, argumentation systems, eGovernment sites and other similar computer-supported systems where ideas are shared, discussed, and selected by a community of users. Examples of such platforms are those used by a community for the purpose of innovation. The innovation community may include the employees, partners, or customers of a company or the members of a civic community, city, region, or nation. The ideas submitted may be proposed solutions to an existing problem or proposals for a new item. For example, the innovation community proposes and selects new services or products for an organization with which it is associated.
Ideas are often submitted as free text and are reviewed by other members of the community. The reviewers may annotate the submitted ideas with their comments on the ideas, also as free text. The content shared by the community is thus often in the form of unstructured data, such as textual descriptions of ideas and textual annotations of reviewer comments associated with an idea.
One problem with such platforms is that a large quantity of informal content has to be sifted through to identify content that conveys value. At the level of the community or organization, the unstructured content in the platforms remains underexploited, which leads to information loss. As a result, less informed decisions are taken by the community or organization. Another problem is that individual users contributing to the system often lack experience in generating contributions, such as idea descriptions. These often lack emphasis on the core of the idea, thus more time and effort is involved. Additionally, in the case of idea annotations there is often a lack of conformity among comments, votes, tags, idea status, and timestamps.
Comments may provide valuable input for the evaluation of the ideas and may also add relevant content to the ideas. However, existing systems are not able to mine the comments and make use of the evaluations and suggestions that they contain.